The Darkest Tower

by John C. Wright

  He stiffened as if I had struck his funny bone. “How do you know the name of Zibanitu, the constellation of the balance? That knowledge is secret!”

  I smiled my most annoying smile, one I developed and practiced on my bullying older brothers during years of sibling rivalry. “You’ve read in your horoscope that you never learn the answer to that question, haven’t you? No–” I looked carefully at his eyes. He did not look bored. “No, it’s more than that. You’ve reached the end of your predictions!”

  He raised his black glove to his black face-veil, as if trying to stroke his hidden beard with his hidden fingers, but he did not answer. I suppose a man who never fibs just never answers when he does not want to speak truthfully.

  “You pored over your horoscopes, figuring out, one word at a time, every word I would say,” I pressed on. “But when you reached the point in the story where you tell me that in three days you will torture this girl, you figured there was no point in calculating the rest. You saved it, like a kid saving himself a tiny bit of candy, because you are trapped in a cage just like mine, just as terrible as mine, and you want to talk to another human being as terribly as I do. You want to talk to a live human being, not the soulless automatons you think human beings are. You endured that entire conversation just to get to this point, where you don’t know what I am going to say. Have I guessed right?”

  His eyes narrowed. He made another small gesture. Two of the spikes from the walls of the cage turned into spears and impaled me right through my chest and abdomen. I did not die and could still breathe, but I was in a lot of pain.

  The pain of spears passing through my body was insignificant compared to the pain of falling and breaking all my bones and rupturing all my organs. I ignored this minor pain and kept speaking.

  “So you are not insane, Emmy-Drinky. May I call you Emmy-Drinky, Your Most High Royal Bigwankership? Your name is too long and stupid for me to say. Not insane, but you wish you were, because you figured out that you are a slave. Your masters, these things you call stars, communicate their orders to you by star-patterns and signs, and when you read your horoscopes, you are just decoding messages that contain the orders you must obey. All the astrologers figure this out eventually, and when that happens, your masters order them thrown out a window of this nice high tower, because you are not allowed to tell anyone that you are a slave. Have I guessed right?”

  This time, I did weird him out. I spoke so normally and so calmly with these big freakish spears jammed through my flesh, that fear entered his eyes.

  I realized what that fear meant.

  Sure, his people knew about people like me. They knew what planet I was from. But he, himself, Enmeduranki the Master of All Magicians, he did not own a television and did not watch horror movies, and he was the Dark Lord of this place, with lots of desk work, and so he probably never went to torture chambers and battlefields.

  He had heard about Undying Ones before, but he never looked into the eyes of one, and saw him bleeding from huge gaping wounds that would kill a mortal man a dozen times over, talking like it meant nothing. The difference between being a military historian and being a battlefield veteran was in his eyes.

  I laughed at him.

  He knew the future, did he? Knew everything? He had read about everything, seen it in a chart or something. He had not seen it in person.

  Enmeduranki said, “How– how can you live– how can you be alive like that? Surely it hurts?” He was not bored now. There was astonishment in his voice.

  I said, “Answer my question, and I will answer yours.”

  “The answer is yes. We are both trapped by cages. You see your bars, I merely know mine.”

  “The answer is yes. It hurts like hell.”

  “Answer me one more.”

  “No.”

  “I have many torments I can inflict, if you fail to answer.”

  “Bite me.”

  “Do you not fear pain?”

  “You cannot kill me, Emmy-Drinky, so the pain does not scare me. It only hurts. You see the difference? Without the fear, the thing that happened to you cannot happen to me.”

  “What thing?”

  “You thought you learned the secrets of the universe and of the future, but you only learned you are a slave. Your masters control you more completely than the lowest of men or creatures working for you. But I am a free man. Have you ever seen one like me before?”

  Enmeduranki was not impressed with my speech. He leaned back on his throne, and laughed a very thin, very bitter sort of laugh.

  “Yes, deathless youth! I have seen so-called free men in cages like yours, both before the torments, and after: both before they bow and worship the stars, and after. None of the other of the Hosts of the Undying Ones has studied arts and letters or knew the names of the constellations. You will be craftier than they, and wiser. I have read the accounts in the horoscopes of the deeds you will do in the service of the Dark Tower, both in wars of this generation and wars renewed in generations to come.”

  “I will not serve you,” I said.

  “We shall first overwhelm and overcome your aeon Earth, which we call Albion, once you lift the storms and wards that hinder us; second, the aeon of Sabtechadur, where the seven-ringed Grail of Jamshyd shines and reflects the seven heavens, we shall utterly destroy, once you enter the Psychomanteum in Agarththa to defile the Grail and break it; and third, the Great City of Gold in the aeon of Sasan, which is the coal of all the fires that burn against us, the fountainhead of all the waters that undermine us. Death to the Golden City shall you achieve, that city which is the main foe and obstacle to the Great Tower. Through you, we shall have her twelvefold gemmed foundations overthrown, and in fire, her walls shall lose the luster of the looking glass, and melt to shining slag!

  “All of these great quests require that you pass where no living soul can walk, nor cast the unclean spirits out. Neither the Land of Light where all men stagger blind, nor the Deathly Wind that walks among the mountains of the dog-headed monsters, nor the Witchstorms of the sea shall hinder you. You are a lettered man. No other of the Lalilummutillut has this art.”

  His eyes glittered with something like lust. It was gross.

  His voice fell to a tittering whisper, a croon: “Y-Yes-ss, yes, my lovely boy, you will serve well indeed the Dark Tower in its might.”

  I laughed long and loud. “Beans and baloney!”

  I was pretty sure Sabtechadur was the name Dad had given for where Mom was besieged, so the chance of my helping him conquer that was less than one-half zero squared, and just as impossible.

  And, just on principle, I was not helping any group that called itself The Darkest Tower against places called Great Golden City and Land of Light. That was a no-brainer. I mean, get serious. Suppose you were from another world and came to ours circa 1940 and you saw an SS officer in his black uniform with the silver skulls on his collar, and he said he wanted to exterminate some folks called The Chosen People from some place called The Holy Land, who would you think the bad guy was?

  He drew back when I laughed, as if his feelings were hurt. “Young whelp! You dare…?”

  “Old man, I don’t fear pain. You cannot make me yield by torturing me.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  Enmeduranki spoke softly. “As you say. Not by torturing you.”

  It took me a moment to realize who he meant. “Torturing the creature you call my girlfriend will not work, because I am of the Host of the Undying Ones! We don’t have love or duty, remember? We think you mortals are weak. We laugh at you.”

  I grabbed my left hand in my right, stuck out my thumb, and drove it into my left eye, thumbnail first. It is harder to do than you’d think, believe me. Blood and vitreous humor went pouring down my cheek.

  “Your torture means nothing to me!” I said. “Go ahead and torture her in front of me! I will laugh!”

  He shook his head. “You practice deception. If you are willing to smite out your eye to save he
r, then you will break not long after the barbed hooks enter her flesh. Do you know how many days a girl can scream in pain before her voice fails forever? We do. You were raised by mortal men, and you have our weaknesses and compassions. The stars have predicted you serve us for her sake, to spare her pain. Fate is fated.”

  10. One Last Question

  He did not move. I wondered what else he had to say. This will sound weird, but the pain in my eye, and where the spears passed through my body, seemed to recede when I controlled my breathing, and cleared my mind. I could still feel how hurt I was, but, somehow, at the same time, I realized that nothing could really hurt me at all, because it could not bring me one inch closer to dying.

  So I said, “I have a question for you.”

  He was amused. “You? Question me? I am the Lord of all Magicians. The Great Prince Who Binds Heaven to Earth is merely a warlord. Why should I answer?”

  “Because you are crazy and lonesome and you want to talk to someone who doesn’t fear you. Have I guessed right?”

  He chuckled the way you might at the antic of some little pet that lightened your day. He said, “You are wise beyond the reach of most Undying Ones and other abominations. For this, you will wear the name Utu’abzu, the Ascending Sun.”

  The two huge spikes pulled out of my body. I wanted to stay all cool and silent, but it really freaking hurt. I screamed a little. Okay, a lot. Oh, well.

  He said, “Answer my question first. Do your people have the art of horoscope reading?”

  “Honestly? We do. They appear in our newspapers every day. Most people regard them as trifling and ridiculous. We laugh at those who believe in astrology and astrologers.”

  He stiffened in shock, his tired eyes wide. “Trifling and– what?”

  I said, “That thing in your hand. I notice you keep looking at it. I saw that Lord Ersu had one, too. What is it? Some sort of portable little star-reading gizmo? So you can do a quick check of your calculations or something?”

  “It is called kenuminatil.” The word meant truth-measuring instrument. “It measures changes in stellar influences as seconds and minutes of arc pass.”

  “So you can ask your golden compass if I am lying. Did you ever get a report on what happened to your first three small twilight gate machines you sent into my world? I don’t know what you call them. The little ones.”

  “Spears.”

  “Good name. The first three spears. Two were shot the same moment they emerged, and the third opened a gate for a minute or less, and then was negated suddenly. Does that match up with your info? If someone from our world sent spears through a small gate to try to open a bigger gate, just like what you did to us, what would happen? You would predict the exact moment, and have people standing by to smash them the moment they came through.”

  “Are you saying your Astrologers foretold that we were making our breach?”

  “You don’t get two questions. My turn.”

  He sat back on his throne, gripping the armrests with his gloves, frustrated. “Ask.”

  “These things you keep calling stars. They enslaved you. You don’t know what they are. They are just something or someone who gives you orders, using your star patterns and your calculus to tell you what to do, and cursing you like Oedipus was cursed if you disobey.”

  “You blaspheme most delightfully, Undying One,” he said with a slight laugh, “But you do not ask a question.”

  “The question is not mine, but yours. Riddle me this, Lord of Magicians: If the stars have enslaved you, and if serving them destroys your soul, and your reward for your loyal service is to be murdered by them, thrown out the window like a chamber pot, why serve them?”

  Since he and I both saw that it did not matter what he said aloud to me in reply, he turned on the Moebius gate hidden in the rim of the hole in the ceiling of the cell, summoned an orb of darkness surrounded by the swath of many-colored fire, and vanished.

  11. Despair

  After he left, I was desolate. It was as if my thoughts were affecting my body.

  I felt a strange rumble in my stomach, like I had swallowed a worm. Then, a moment later, the blue light began to shine from the floorboards, and my stomach quieted down.

  I was alone, and I had water, and I had three days. After that, they were going to torture Penny.

  If I could kill myself, they would have no reason to torture her. But I could not even do that. They were going to torture her. And I could do nothing.

  Falconress and Marineress

  1. The Girl in the Paper

  I had heard of Penelope Dreadful two years before I met her. Me and the entire English-speaking world. I was thirteen at the time.

  My dad had the habit, when he would sit in his favorite big chair with his back to the window and the sunlight on his lap, of shouting advice at the newspaper, or arguing with the editorials, even though all he was holding in his hand was, well, it was paper, a crinkly yet inanimate object.

  Sometimes he would bring us in on the arguments with the newspaper. I always took Dad’s side. The newspaper could not give me an advance on my allowance because it was a crinkly yet inanimate object (as stated above, see last paragraph) and therefore it was not in my enlightened self-interest to side with the paper. My brothers reasoned likewise.

  This particular morning, however, I sided with the newspaper and against my brothers and father. It seemed that this girl only two years older than I was had decided to circumnavigate the globe all by herself.

  Well, herself and her pet bird: a tiny, fierce-looking thing with gray wings and white and black breast. The newspaper said it was a merlin. It was very photogenic. The papers were always showing the sailor girl in a big smile and small bathing suit with a big glove swallowing her slender wrist on which her small bird perched. She was very photogenic too.

  Girl and boat and bird had set out from Cabo San Lucas at the tip of the Baja Peninsula in February; in March she rounded Cape Horn, and in May, the Cape of Good Hope. June found her in a remote area of the Indian Ocean, about 2,000 miles west of Australia, when a thirty-foot high wave capsized her forty-foot yacht and snapped off the mast. Radio contact was lost for two days while seaplanes and fishing boats in the area looked for her.

  The newspaper said that her father, a widower of no fixed income who lived off of honorariums and patents, should be arrested and charged with child-endangerment, then tarred and feathered, hanged and sentenced to transportation for life. (I don’t know if that is what the newspaper actually said, or if that was my Dad’s special interpretation.) Because of the controversy, the World Speed Sailing Record Council officially discontinued marking the world record for solo world circumnavigation in the “youngest” category.

  “What are they going to do?” Dad bellyached, “Pad the entire world in a pillow? Make everyone wear a helmet who wants to stick his head in a lion’s mouth? The whole world is turning into little girls! And now the only one with guts to do anything is—well, this little girl!”

  Like I said, normally I’d agree. But there was something about being lost at sea which always sent a particularly cold little icepick of fear into my heart. It was one of the recurring thoughts that used to scare me at night. My brother once told me this creepy little story about how the second to last woolly mammoth in the world drowned in the sea, fighting waves against which even its great strength was of no avail. So I was not a fan of letting women drown.

  The other reason was that when you disappear at sea, no one finds your body to put into the grave. When there is no body, they just put up a stone. I knew this because Mom’s funeral earlier that year had just been over a stone.

  So the argument got pretty heated. Mom had not been gone long, and we had not gotten used to having no one around to break up fights. I remember at one point, I said, “If Grandpa Mikhail had let Mom get lost at sea, we’d never have been born!”

  Alexei hissed. “Not us, but you’d have been born! We picked you up from the Monkey House at the zo
o!”

  Dad’s voice came out from behind the newspaper like the voice of Jehovah from the fires of Mount Sinai. “Son! You are never to speak that way.”

  Alexei was now angry with me for getting him in trouble. He turned sideways on the couch we were sitting on, and kicked me with both legs, trying to trash-compact me into the corner where the couch arm met couch back.

  I called out. “Da-aa-ad! He’s picking on me!”

  Dad did not look up from the newspaper. “Grab his heel and his toes like I showed you, twist, and fracture his ankle. Try to make it a clean break.”

  Mom was not there to stop word fights, so she was also not there to stop fight fights. I ended up crying, but I was getting too old to end up crying, so I started making regular stops at the gym, and paid more attention to my physical training and weapon practice. I figured the best way to prevent my brothers from murdering me, was to be fit and hale enough to murder them. There is an old saying: If you want peace, prepare for war. I think it is in the Bible or something.

  It was not until later that I realized that Dad may not have been snapping at me or Alexei. He simply could not bear to hear about Mom. And his voice had sounded a little weird when he told me to mug Alexei. Maybe Dad was hiding behind that paper until he had a chance to wipe his face, and he needed the three-way wrestling match as a distraction. Dobrin joined in, of course. (I did not have the strength to twist off Alexei’s foot, but I was able to send him across the coffee table onto the carpet.)

  Four months later, she was in the newspapers again. Amid cries of outrage and calls for new laws to stop such recklessness, her father had bought her another yacht from a shipwright in India, and now she was setting sail from the Coromandel Coast to resume her voyage. The newspaper speculated at her motive, since circumnavigating the world with a four-month interruption in the middle did not count for any record, and even if it had, the official record would no longer be kept for the youngest mariner to circle the globe. Everyone was puzzled, but I understood. You finish what you start.